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The best things in life are for free—and need to be kept that way.Tim Berners-Lee,physicist and Oxford University graduate,believed in it.The man who invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989-90 could easily have become a trillionaire,had he decided to monetise his invention. Today,thanks to him,millions of users worldwide post and access multimedia data on the internet,adding to the steadily growing mountain of casual,business, informative,academic and entertainment-related content online.Despite its popularity,the WWW (or the Web) is not an easy concept to understand.Indeed,many consider it synonymous with the Internet.But as experts say,“ WWW is a subset of the internet.However,the internet owes its massive popularity to the Web!”In 1989,Berners-Lee,then working with CERN (the Geneva-based European Particle Physics Laboratory),proposed a global hypertext project
METHODOLOGY OF THE CEO POLL WORLD WIDE WEB
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o select 25 ideas from a million wasn't easy. ET first selected 25 ideas which, according to editorial judgement, had gone beyond being mere business ideas and pushed human minds to new levels. Needless to say, ideas which have played vital roles in shaping our lives got into the top 25 list. The 25-Ideas list was then presented to 50 top chairmen/managing directors and CEOs of leading Indian companies to rank each idea as per three parameters, namely Originality Impact on Stakeholders Relevance Over Time.
ORIGINALITY To understand if the idea was merely an upgrade of an existing thought or truly singular in its concept at the time when it was launched.
MICRO CHIPS
MOBILE PHONES When Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive considered to be the inventor of the practical portable mobile handset, made the first call on a handheld on April 3, 1973, little did he foresee that the product would shrink the world and connect billions across countries and continents. About 35 years later, over 60% of the world’s 6.6 billion people own a mobile handset, while 80% have access to one. The mobile phone outsells every other product in the world, including bicycles, television sets and even wristwatches. India, the world’s fastest growing telecom market with over 10 million new mobile users being added every month, enters 2009 with just under 350 million customers and is likely to exit the year with a cellular subscriber base of 460 million.
IMPACT ON STAKEHOLDERS By stakeholders we mean not just those whose idea it was but the larger universe of consumers, employees and even competition. How successful was the idea in touching and changing the lives of these stakeholders? Did this happen immediately or over time? Was it able to become a part of people's habits/lifestyle?
RELEVANCE OVER TIME There are certain ideas whose impact may not have been immediate but they gradually entered people's lives over time. Conversely, there are some ideas which may have made an immediate splash but faced obsolescence with the passage of time. There are still more ideas whose impact remains as big today as it was on the day they were announced. Which of these scenarios does the idea fall in and to what extent? The CEOs were asked to allocate points (from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest) to each of the three parameters for every idea. Points given to the three parameters were then summed up to find how many points out of a total of 30 points a CEO had given to an idea. Finally, the total marks, given by the 50 CEOs, for each idea was collated to determine the total overall points. The idea which got the maximum points was ranked one. One with the least points came 25th on the list.
It took a 007 for the world to fully come to terms with Global Positioning System, or GPS. As Korean Airlines Flight 007 strayed into former USSR prohibited airspace in 1983, it was duly shot down. The world was shaken, and the then US President Ronald Reagan stirred into action by issuing a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use for the greater good. The GPS, simply put, uses a constellation of 24 to 32 Medium Earth Orbit satellites that transmit microwave signals, which enable GPS receivers to determine their current location, time and velocity. Though it is managed by the US Air Force’s 50th Wing, GPS is now commonly used by civilians for navigation. The GPS has revolutionised the way people find each other. GPS devices now come fitted in mobile phones, PDAs, laptops, cars, bikes, airplanes, cycles, ships, parachutes and even trekking shoes. Such devices are now used for finding stray dogs and cats to accurately dropping missiles and bombs in battle zones.
Despite a century, photography remained an elitist and expensive hobby for humanity, which resorted to the tedious and expensive analog photography process. The commercial introduction of digital cameras in 1997 changed the notion completely, beginning a process of ‘democratisation’ of photography, making it within reach of the have-nots. With a peak sale of 30 million analogue camera units in a single year in the early 1990s, digital camera sales surged and crossed the 100 million-mark in 2004. Till date, around 500 million digital camera units have been sold worldwide. The technology, which involves recording of still images and video as a computerised file on memory cards, took over two decades to go commercial and involved work by many individuals and companies. Besides the economics, it offered other advantages like displaying images on a LCD screen, storing thousands of images and deleting them, making it an instant hit.
based on his research.The project proposed to make hypertext documents freely available to users everywhere. Today,if we are able to raid the internet’s bounties for everything from the history of Machu Picchu to Nehru’s famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’,it is because of the point and click system Berners-Lee and his associates pioneered.One can view WWW pages that may contain text,images, videos,multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks. No one currently enjoys proprietary status of the WWW. Voluntary groups like W3C (WWW consortium led by Tim Berners-Lee himself),ICANN and Internet Governance Forum under the UN ensure that the WWW remains like the commons in medieval England—to be shared and maintained by all.The Web now has over 1.4 billion users worldwide and this number is growing fast.
PLASTIC MONEY Nothing has come to represent cash the way credit cards have. The idea of using a card to make purchases was first drawn up by Edward Bellamy in 1887 in his novel Looking Backward and its sequel Equality. The US was the first country to launch it in the early 1900s, although the usage was at the time restricted to being ‘unorganised’. It was Diners Club International, the first independent credit card company in the world and American Express, which changed the way cards were used. They developed it into a tangible business phenomenon. In India, the concept of plastic money caught on in the late 1980s, only after private sector banking came into practice. Today, all private sector banks and many nationalised banks offer credit cards, the market leader being ICICI Bank.
Outsourcing is a plain-vanilla sub-contracting process, traditionalists contend. Actually, it goes back to 19th century manufacturing when the sweating system prevailed in American cities. Suppliers used to ‘outsource’ the work of making garments and boots for the American Forces to sub-contractors. The process continued to remain in manufacturing with large-scale sub-contracting of production work to suppliers in Asia by companies like Nike in the 1970s. Many companies also decided to set up subsidiaries in Asia to handle some of the production work. In the 1980s, outsourcing moved beyond the realm of manufacturing with services, such as travel booking and payroll processing, being forked out to players like American Express and EDS. But outsourcing’s heydays really took wing in the 1990s with IT as American firms handed over their applications development and maintenance work to foreign vendors, such as Indian IT and BPO companies.
GPS TRACKING
GOOGLE SEARCH
Perhaps no other idea has had the kind of impact that the small, embedded inside devices, silently working chip has had on people’s lives. It’s ubiquitous-in everything from computers, cars, cellphones, coffeemakers, space shuttles, smart toasters, washing machines, and so on. Not surprisingly, the global chip market is over $200 billion a year and the market for all the products that use a chip is well over a trillion dollars! Chips perform various tasks by design. Meaning that some are more complex than others. The most sophisticated chip is a microprocessor, whose transistors can execute hundreds of millions of instructions per second. These chips or integrated circuits as they were called when first developed, were invented by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce who later founded Intel, the world’s largest chip-maker. Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958 and successfully demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on September 12, 1958. He won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part of the invention of the chip. Noyce came up with his own idea of the chip, six months after Kilby. Noyce’s chip solved many practical problems that the microchip developed by Kilby had not. Today, a world without chips is inconceivable and in the not-sodistant future, microchips will process information faster than the human brain. Brace up for superhuman robots.
OUTSOURCING IS KING
Nobody can dispute the revolution that emailing has brought about. A small kilobyte sent on the information superhighway has made a giga-leap for all mankind. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) is believed to be the first computer to demonstrate e-mailing. Users of CTSS could store files online from a remote location, just like emails today are stored on Yahoo or Google servers. Like some of the other technology inventions, the roots of e-mailing can also be traced to the US Department of Defense (DoD). E-mailing became a regular feature for users of the DoD’s ARPANET (the early form of internet). It was here that use of the @ sign became popular in 1970s. As the internet evolved, web-based mail became a regular but paid feature offered by many ISPs. Lycos.com used to offer paid email as early as 1995. But it took an Indian, Sabeer Bhatia, in 1997 to popularise the use of free email via his free webmail service—Hotmail.
DIGITAL CAMERAS
It’s said that the ultimate success of a product lies in its brand name becoming a verb. Google is one such brand. Imagine carrying the world’s knowledge in the brain and giving out near-results whenever someone pops a question. The web search engine has managed to do just that, and in the process, made hard-copy monoliths like the Encyclopaedia Britannica run out of business. Google began as a dissertation project in January 1996 by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford. It later evolved as one of the most popular inventions on the internet. Page was soon joined by his mate, Sergey Brin, on the thesis. Now Googling is officially listed as a verb in the Oxford and Merriam Websters Collegiate dictionaries.
HUMAN INSULIN If there is one disease Indians are most wary about, it is Diabetes, a medical condition where the human body cannot produce or use insulin properly. Over centuries, the disease had resulted in deaths of millions worldwide. So when Dr Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best first made insulin from an animal pancreatic extract in 1922, it came as a blessing to mankind. Later, Eli Lilly joined hands with the scientists and in 1982, along with Genentech, launched the world’s first insulinHumulin. The global sales of insulin is expected to double to around $15 billion by 2010. Danish company Novo Nordisk is the global leader with 45% market share followed by American rival Eli Lilly, with about 30%.
VIDEO CONFERENCING
Videoconferencing (VC) took its baby steps as far back as the 1920s when engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories started thinking of ways to transmit voice and video over phone lines. On April 7, 1927, Bell Labs’ office played host to an initial demonstration of what would later come to be known as video-conferencing. This two-way television as a system of communication was refined further only in 1956, when AT&T made the first PicturePhone test system, a kind of visual telephone. In the 1990s, VC systems resorted to open standards and were no more expensive proprietary equipment and software. Soon, Internet Protocol-based videoconferencing became possible and later advances shifted it to personal computers as well. VC has revolutionised not only the way business is done, but has also facilitated telemedicine, teleeducation and helps the environment. It has brought down time and expenses on travel as business meetings can be done with participants in distant places.
Although the human race had developed cooling systems in ancient times, with Romans cooling buildings by flowing water through aqueducts in the walls, it took Willis Carrier to challenge nature by inventing the first modern electrical air-conditioning device in 1902 in the US. He developed the product while solving a task to stem fluctuating heat and humidity conditions at a printing plant. Surrounded by fog while waiting for a train in Pittsburgh, Carrier refined the idea of a machine which would control heat, humidity, air circulation and ventilation, besides cleaning the air. Then, the father of modern air-conditioning formed his own company, Carrier Engineering Corp., with the idea of selling cooling gadgets in 1915. The company bearing his name marketed its air-conditioners to consumers in the 1950s and was later acquired by UTC. It continues to be the world’s largest air-conditioning firm today.
FREE MAIL
CABLE TV
AIR CONDITIONING
The world, which boasts of having dedicated TV channels on every possible subject, traces the origin of Cable TV to the states of Arkansas, Oregon and Pennsylvania in US. In a bid to provide television entertainment in rural areas (where television signals were not accessible), a TV (sets) salesman came up with the idea of using cable in 1948. But the pilot transmission was done almost simultaneously by James Y. Davidson, Leroy "Ed" Parsons, John Walson and Martin Malarkey in the US. This was followed by English movie channel HBO becoming the first to use satellite mode of transmitting content in 1976. From the basic analog terrestrial broadcast in the 1920s to Cable & Satellite TV, the mode of transmission for providing content has now transformed into direct-to-home (DTH), Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and even mobile TV. Cable & Satellite television, which started in India during the Gulf War, is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment for consumers.
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Although night games played under floodlights dates back to the 1880s, it took the big league baseball clubs to adopt the gimmick as late as May 24, 1935, when the first night game in Major League history kicked off between the Cincinnati Reds and Philadelphia Phillies at Crosley Field. In cricket, Kerry Packer and his World Series Cup 'circus' saw a match being played for the first time under lights. Innovation stayed with the game and just when tests and one-day games were becoming a bit much for the audience, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) introduced 20-20 in the UK with the first set of matches being played on June 13, 2003. In an era of shortened attention spans, time crunches and most importantly, corporate sponsorships, Lalit Modi did not have an idea but merely realised the viability of an existing idea, in terms of eyeball grabs and the financials.
NIGHT GAMES
From the first floppy disks in the 1970s that found a way into most of our lives, the concept of how much may be stored has come a long way. The floppy, which had a capacity of around 80KB, pales in significance when compared to the 64GB pen drives. Undoubtedly, memory storage devices have evolved. Compact disks, which were first commercialised by Sony and Phillips, in the mid-1980s, have moved to a stage of sophisticated DVDs and now Blue-ray discs. Twenty years on, and Sony is pushing the Blue-rays on its Playstation. Now is the age of iPods, gaming consoles and external hard disks that store music, movies and files. The future is probably the dumb-bell shaped 'rotaxane' molecule, which has been used by UCLA and the California Institute of Technology to fabricate memory at a density of 100 billion bits per square centimeter.
MEMORY STICKS
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UNIVERSAL FRANCHISE
LOW COST AIRLINES
PACKAGED FOOD Heat-n-eat, mix-n-fix, thaw-n-claw. If it ain't evident yet, look up 'packaged foods'. The category cropped up in the 19th century to cater to the infantry on foot and horses. The practice of freezing foods to preserve them dates back to 1000 BC. But it took American entrepreneur Clarence Birdseye to finally make frozen foods a reality in the 1930s. In many markets, packaged foods took a giant leap in the late 1970s and '80s, thanks to consistent and innovative marketing. It was around that time that the invention of microwave ovens led to the actual category escalation. The late 1990s saw the beginning of a complete transformation of convenience foods-the health and wellness boom. Within Asia, Japan is the largest food processing market.
BABY DIAPERS Kids look dapper in diapers. That was probably how western salesmen used to vend diapers door to door in the 1960s. Since then, the pitch has turned quite a bit. Today, Huggies (Kimberly Clark) and Pampers (P&G) are the two biggest diaper makers globally. The Indian disposable diaper market is currently pegged at Rs 100 crore each year, with a huge chunk (60%) of the market share hogged by Kimberly Clark's Huggies. While P&G's Pampers comes second with 30%, domestic companies like Godrej and Wipro are also in the business, apart from some Chinese brands in the gray market. It was not until the early 20th century that the world saw modern diapers for babies. In 1942, the first disposable diaper was manufactured by Swedish company Paulistorm.
The first online book store was set up by Charles Stack in 1992, who called it Book Stacks Unlimited (later Books.com). A couple of year later, Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com from his garage. The same year, Netscape introduced SSL encryption (to improve security of the data transferred online), which is essential for online shopping. The next big thing was eBay, which started in 1996 as an online swap shop for Californian geeks. The online auction website was founded as AuctionWeb in San Jose by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar and Phil Fischer. Today, the world wide web has thousands of online shopping sites which one can use to get the best deals. "Online shopping is an alternative to shopping at retail outlets and is especially being used by younger, more techsavvy people in India.
Eating out, shopping, studying in school or college, holidaying-franchising has penetrated each of these activities. Simply put, franchising is a model where business owners let independent operators use their company name and supplies in exchange for a fee. Perhaps, the first franchising effort dates back to the 1850s, when American entrepreneur Isaac Singer-a sewing machine specialist-wanted to step up distribution of his product. Other franchising firsts include the telegraph systemoperated by railroad companies but controlled by Western Union. In the early years, product franchising meant collecting royalties on specific products, and not on gross sales. But it was food services companies that modernised the franchising model around the mid-1930s. In 1935, Howard Deering Johnson teamed up with Reginald Sprague to establish the first modern restaurant franchise. As a business model, franchising generates more than $1 trillion in US sales annually. While the US has 2,000 franchise systems, India has 800, but it's only expected to grow by about 3040% in 4-5 years. Today, franchising in India accounts for only 2% of the total retail sales of about $405 billion, which speaks volumes about its potential.
ONLINE SHOPPING
CONTACT LENSES
An old adage sticks out to this day like a sore thumb-Boys never make passes at lasses who wear glasses. Well, critics would slam-dunk a lot of yada-yada and admonish that adage, claiming, say, 'glasses are now for the masses' or 'here's to Glas(s)nost II'. Bottomline, let the eyes speak for themselves. In the run of things, contact lenses seem to fit just fine. In 1508, multifaceted Renaissance raconteur Leonardo da Vinci penned a method of changing corneal power by submerging the eye in a bowl of water. Taking a cue, German physiologist Adolf Eugen Fick developed the first usable glass contact lenses in 1888. These were quite unwieldy and seven decades later, in 1959, Czech chemists Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lim, came up with the first soft (hydrogel) lenses. The latest to come in were the silicone hydogel lenses, which were more comfortable and easier to wear for extended hours. With coloured options like blue, green, brown and so on, contact lenses have also become a fashion accessory of the times.
Liquor baron and Kingfisher Airlines promoter Vijay Mallya may have to rethink his earlier stand on the future of budget airlines. Almost seven out of the top 10 profit-making airlines in the world are low-cost. Freddie Laker, believed to be the pioneer of the lowcost model in the 1970s, can certainly be credited with revolutionising air travel across the globe. Though it took some time to travel to Asia and a little more to India, the low-cost model gave wings to millions who would have otherwise waited for years. In India, aviation experts don't hesitate to divide the country's aviation history into two parts- pre-and-post-Deccan. Captain GR Gopinath, who founded Air Deccan in 2003, is considered to have made air travel affordable to even a blue-collar worker.
Vending machines, more commonly called dispensers (not to be confused with ad buntings), were quite literally, Greek to the rest of the world. The invention goes back to a first-century Greek engineer-mathematician called Hero of Alexandria, whose machine upon accepting a coin, dispensed a fixed amount of holy water. Cut to England in the 1880s, the height of the Industrial Revolution, when the first coin-operated vending machine came to be used for dispensing post cards. Thereon, gums, candies, cigarettes, newspaper and even cash (ATM) dispensers became commonplace. In the amusement sector, the birth of slot machines can be traced to these early inventions. Closer home, at the newly-built Hyderabad airport, a smart beverage vending machine stares passerby on the face. Its unique feature allows it to pay out the remaining money (change) with currency notes and coins, making it the first of its kind in the world. Prior to 2000, all vending machines were imported in India.
VIAGRA PILLS
To help you understand exactly how to channelise your idea into a workable business proposition, our panel of experts will guide you every step of the way. To start with, go through the queries posed by readers and their answers by our experts as part of the daily Q&A: READER: I understand this in an initiative to bring generators of ideas and mentors in order to see the idea bearing fruition. How does this partnership work? OUR VIEW: On the submission of your business plan, we will check the viability of your idea and invite you to attend group mentoring session. This will involve experts/mentors who will give a general overview of requirements of a good business plan and their overall experience. After which your business plan is submitted and if it gets short-listed, then a mentor will be assigned to guide you more specifically.
DIGITAL MUSIC PLAYERS October 23, 2003. Mark that date. For that's when Apple Inc. launched the iPod, which in the words of Apple boss Steve Jobs, "will put 1,000 songs in your pocket". That saw the end of Sony Walkmans and ushered in a new generation of music players. Ever since, storage capacities have come a long way. The first iPod was developed within one year and had a storage capacity of 5GB. While other MP3 players, none of which could ever capture the imagination of the mass market like the iPod did, used a Flash drive for storage, the iPod has an internal hard drive. "This was a technological innovation for that time," says Prof. Veni Madhavan, who heads the Society for Innovation and Development at IISc, Bangalore.
ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS
ENTREPRENEURSHIP CLASSROOM
The internet forges new relationships, deals, links. In the virtual world, online communities are commonplace. But the birth of social networking, really, goes back to 1979 when a couple of undergrads from Duke UniversityTom Truscott and Jim Ellis-started tinkering with their Usenet, an internet discussion system, to get social virtual groups organized to foster communication so that readers could read and post public messages. Ever since, networking websites have taken over the world by storm-if Myspace cropped up in 2003, Facebook changed the face of social networking a year later. In India, the process really got underway through Google's Orkut. Today, Orkut (named after a Turkish software engineer Orkut Buyukkokten) has the second highest number of users from India at 18%, after Brazil at 51%.
READER: I want to start a business related to cars and wanted help in market research. I want to know the numbers of cars in Thane & Mumbai. Where can I source the statistics? OUR VIEW: Unfortunately you will have to do a background/ market research on this yourself and then decide whether your idea serves the requirements of the industry and market space. If you think it does then do present your idea and depending on its viability we will invite you to meet experts. READER: What kind of support can we expect from the expert team when we come out with an idea? OUR VIEW: On your concept being accepted, we will invite you to a session where a large group of entrepreneurs will get to hear from investors/experts about the requirements of a good business plan. This will be followed by (on acceptance) a personal mentoring session to guide you through the process of finalising your plan. READER: I am an innovator and have developed a new idea to improve the efficiency of a diesel engine which can save 10% fuel and lower emissions. What type of business proposal will help in commercialising this idea? OUR VIEW: One idea could be the truck/ automotive sector or the generator manufacturing companies who could use your innovation. Would be good to talk to them and see how your innovation fits. That would be the beginning of commercialising the idea as if it has industry application, then commercialization works.
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It is not everyday that one strikes upon a drug to treat impotence. So when scientists in the UK found during clinical trials that hypertension molecules (Sildenafil) induce marked penile erections, the company (Pfizer) decided to develop and sell the medicines as the world's first oral drug to treat erectile dysfunction (ED) and capture the global unmet need for ED. As expected, Viagra immediately became an instant blockbuster drug once it was launched in 1998. More than that, Viagra became one of world's best-known brands; subject of millions of web pages and at least a dozen books have been reportedly written on the drug. It is estimated that over 1.8 billion Viagra pills have been dispensed to over 35 million men across 120 countries. Simply put, six Viagra tablets are sold every second, raking in about $1 billion for the company annually. The British media says Peter Dunn and Albert Wood are the inventors of the drug, a claim disputed by Pfizer.
The profiles of readers who have been sending us their business ideas make for interesting reading. Ideas have been sent to us by people from all walks of life—ranging from management students to senior executives, from traders to social workers. To view snapshot profiles of our participants log onto http://www.ideas.economictimes.com/participants.aspx
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